TWO MONTHS AFTER EARTHQUAKE HORROR

Our building crashed down.... I pulled my family through a tiny gap, it's a miracle we survived

- EMILY RETTER

Somewhere under the mangled mass of terracotta bricks, jagged concrete blocks, upended sofas, scattered shoes and tiny pink socks that was once Lilas’s home lies her bicycle... Somewhere.

The solemn-eyed eight-year-old, clutching a red rose which has inexplicably drifted into this scene of carnage, explains it is riding her bike here that she misses the most.

“I had a friend next door and we played here on our bicycles,” she says.

“When I look at my home now I don’t like it. I am scared.”

Most scary is the dark slit her father Ahmed Cummal, 33, shows us at the mound’s summit.

This is the hole through which Lilas, her three-year-old twin sisters, five-yearold brother and parents crawled to safety after being trapped seven hours when twin earthquakes hit 11 provinces across southern Turkey and northern Syria two months ago this week.

The first tremor, in the early hours of February 6, had a Richter magnitude of 7.7, while the second was 7.6. They killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and over 7,000 in northern Syria, and were followed by thousands of aftershocks.

“We woke up and the earth was shaking,” recalls Ahmed, who brought his family here from Latakia, in war-torn Syria, 11 years ago.

“The whole building crashed down. The lights went out, the ceiling stopped falling just 50cm above us,” he says, his eyes widening with horror.

“It was a terrible fear. It was so dark. There was a tiny gap, a tiny bit of window pane. I smashed it with a block and pulled them out. It was a miracle we survived.”

Amid overwhelming loss and injury, people cling to that word: miracle. But thankfulness for life can only sustain this family for so long.